The guns of January

Ten days ago, a guy walks up to his Congresswoman's local meet-and-greet and he shoots her in the head, and he shoots nineteen more people, and six of them die. And then today, three people get shot up in a high school in L.A. Only in America. No, seriously, only in America, because the only other places I can think of with as many people getting shot in the streets are places where they don't have high schools and/or local politicians are thuggish warlords whose idea of a public appearance is roaring down a street in their armed personnel characters.

But don't fret, this isn't a call for gun control. Or gun restrictions. Or making it harder for mentally ill people to get guns. Or making it harder for little kids to get guns. Or restricting the availability of magazines for firearms (not "clips", I was recently corrected) that hold more bullets than anyone could ever use for self-defense unless they were in the midst of some Georgesque (Miller or Romero, take your pick) future. This isn't a call for anything approaching sanity, because Tuscon brought me to a stunning realization about gun control issues:

I don't care anymore.

That's not quite right. But it's close. Let me put it another way that might be more accurate:

My side lost. I'm over it.

I've never favored an outright ban on firearms. I have too many family members and friends who hunt, and some of them have needed to hunt to survive, really. And there's nothing quite as educational as seeing how a historic firearm was used; seeing how a gun was loaded and operated during, say, the American Civil War, provides some real insight into why battles went the way they did and what they must have been like for the participants.

But my honest opinion is that owning a gun for self defense is pretty fucking stupid. There, I said it. I'm sorry, but that is how I feel about it, and maybe you didn't want to know my opinion or you still don't care, but that's how it is.

And then there are "sporting" uses for firearms, which is fine, I don't have a problem with someone going down to the range and squeezing off a few hundred rounds or whatever, but it still remains a little puzzling as to why someone who wants to do that needs "cop killer" bullets or extra-capacity magazines or an assault rifle or whatever. That is, the National Rifle Association takes the position that there's no such thing as a reasonable restriction on what kind of firearms somebody might own, frequently followed by contentions that if someone wants to go skeet shooting with their M61 Vulcan firing depleted uranium armor-piercing rounds, by God, that's what being an American is all about. Which, I'm sorry, I think is pretty stupid. But what do I know, I'm one of those latte-sipping, bleeding heart city-slickers.

Which means--the "city slicker" part, I mean, not the whole effete pinko commie gun-banning commie part of it--that most of the people in my neighborhood walking the streets with guns probably aren't carrying for sport or game, but so they can put it in someone's face and demand their wallet. But, you know, again, we city people aren't actually Americans or whatever, so forget it.

Look, a gun is a tool that was designed to kill living creatures. Some of those tools were designed very specifically to kill human beings, and some of them were designed to kill other animals, but a gun is a killing device. Unlike a car or a pencil. And a gun is a very well-made and efficient killing device, one that requires minimal skill to be effective (it can kill very easily by accident, and many do so each year), which actually sets guns apart from other killing machines like the longbow or the broadsword, which require quite a lot of physical effort and perhaps even some level of skill or training; yes, yes, I know that guns have recoil and if you want to use one well, you should practice, but the gun is the original point-and-click killing device. If you want to kill someone with a bow, you have to pull the string, and hold it, and take aim, and adjust for environmental conditions, and--have you ever done this? It's hard. Killing someone with a gun is so easy an eight-year-old can do it.

I point this out because sane societies regulate other lethal items, even items whose primary purpose isn't lethal at all. Your car, if you have one, may be the most-regulated personal possession you have: it was required to meet federal environmental and safety regulations before it even left the factory floor, is inspected every year to see that it still meets various state requirements, and your privilege to operate it is dependent not only on your age but on your physical fitness to do so--most, if not all, states will restrict your driving based on your vision or susceptibility to seizures. And the state can detain you, impose civil and/or criminal penalties on you, even incarcerate you if you drive around with a taillight out or ragingly drunk or commit some other violation, major or otherwise. Guns, not so much, because you don't have a Constitutional right to drive.

Nor a Constitutional right to own radioactive materials, rat poison, fireworks, or over-the-counter cough medication. Or any number of things, some of which are reasonably banned or unreasonably restricted. (Making it harder to buy cough syrup will eradicate meth labs? Really? Let me know how that works out for you.)

But last year, the United States Supreme Court curiously interpreted the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to gun ownership, not a state's right to maintain a militia. Being someone who isn't a strict constructionist and who believes in a flexible, living Constitution, I can accept that a Supreme Court Justice can read such a right to gun ownership into the Constitution even though the Second Amendment pretty clearly talks about well-ordered state militias and was written in an era when the subject of whether or not the United States should have a professional standing army was a matter of fierce debate. (Related: several of our Founding Fathers--including Jefferson and Madison--would have looked at our professional, volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and seen their mere existence as being de facto evidence that the United States had devolved into tyranny.) No, I'm one of those "penumbra of rights" liberals, which is why I'm a little boggled that Antonin "Strict Constructionist" Scalia is the one who wrote the five-four opinion stating that the text of the Second Amendment means lots of stuff the Second Amendment doesn't say.

But here's where I'm different from most conservative pundits: I respect our laws and traditions. The United States Supreme Court says gun control is unconstitutional, well... well, I think that's pretty fucking stupid, actually. But that's the law. Until the Court revisits the subject and reverses itself, which I don't really expect them to during my lifetime, that's the law of the land and I bow down to its authority. Dumb or not, that's all she wrote.

The other gun thing that happened this year, you may have seen, was that a jury acquitted the guy who made it possible for that eight-year-old I mentioned earlier to shoot himself. I don't suppose it would be wise for me to speculate as to their reasoning; maybe the Commonwealth just didn't make their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But in my heart it's hard not to look at that case in much the same way I look at last year's Supreme Court decision: well, there it is, then. That's the kind of country we live in. Oh well. I guess we're unstoppable.

Gun control is a dead issue. Like I said, my side lost. I hope I don't sound bitter over it; I mean, okay, I guess I probably can't help being a little bitter. If I say that now I just hope they make gun ownership even easier so we can all just shoot each other and get it over with, already, well--I hope it doesn't sound mean-spirited.

And this certainly isn't meant to disparage my friends and family who own guns lawfully, and use them safely, and even have good reasons to own and use them. There are things that need to be killed, or at least ought to be, and I can accept that.

But if the consequence of deregulating guns for the sake of Constitutional freedom is that kids and judges die, some by their own hands and some by the hands of maniacs, well, y'know, I guess I just need to take it in stride, right? No sense in getting angry about it, because (a) if it's a bad thing, it's not going to change (and give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to tell the shit apart, right?), and (b) it's not really a bad thing. I mean, what's more important, that Jared Loughner murdered a nine-year-old girl or that nothing prevented a crazy guy from getting an extra-capacity magazine at Wal-Mart or wherever the hell he bought it from? In the big picture, there will be more nine-year-old girls, but once a God-given right is infringed upon, it's hard to wrest back from the tyrants we choose to lead us.

So, it's cool. I'm not expecting nor asking for anybody to do anything reasonable about firearms. Twenty... hell, ten, maybe even five years ago, I'm sure I would have pulled my hair and gnashed my teeth over it. But The People have spoken, directly and indirectly, too, through their democratic institutions. Given a choice between making it harder for an eight-year-old to blow the top of his head off and making sure that every yokel in the country has the pleasure of firing a submachinegun at least once in his life, the American majority has expressed a preference time and time again. More guns and more bullets equals more freedom, and anything less than unrestricted access to deadly force is the lace touch of tyranny trying to get into our pants to grab us by the short hairs.

Well, okay. No sense in me preaching or getting mad about it. Like the man said, give the people what they want.

Casualties.